Abstract:

This article surveys recent thinking about agency as a concept, both in general and within women’s and gender history, and then discusses some of the ways in which women’s agency has figured in early modern cultural and economic history over the last several decades. It considers whether women’s agency might have been a matter of norms as well as actions, that is, whether people expected women to be capable, economically productive, qualified, and skilled while simultaneously ascribing to patriarchal norms about women’s weakness. It highlights several research areas in which women’s agency has been a particularly important theme in recent scholarship and examines arguments about women’s and girls’ agency that have emerged in debates about the role of women’s work in European economic expansion. At the end, it briefly connects early modern developments with some trends in women’s lives that have emerged because of the COVID pandemic.

摘要：

本文调查了最近对能动性这一概念的思考，无论是在总体上还是在女性和性别历史中，然后讨论了过去几十年来女性能动性在早期现代文化和经济史上的一些表现方式。它考虑了妇女的能动性是否可能是一个规范和行动的问题，也就是说，人们是否期望妇女有能力、有经济生产力、有资格和有技能，同时又将妇女的弱点归咎于父权制规范。它强调了几个研究领域，在这些领域中，妇女能动性一直是最近学术研究中特别重要的主题，并研究了在关于妇女工作在欧洲经济扩张中的作用的辩论中出现的有关妇女和女孩能动性的争论。最后，它简要地将早期现代发展与因新冠病毒大流行而出现的女性生活的一些趋势联系起来。